by Eric Prisbell, USA TODAY Sports

by Eric Prisbell, USA TODAY Sports

ATLANTA - Jerry Tarkanian arrived here at the Final Four with his family on Friday, three days before he will be named to the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame.

A person with direct knowledge of the announcement confirmed the news to USA TODAY Sports. The person spoke on condition of anonymity because it has yet to be announced. The news was first reported by CBSSports.com.

Being named to the Hall of Fame is a crowning achievement for 82-year-old Tarkanian, the architect of some of the sport's greatest teams who was also shadowed by NCAA investigators for decades. In the weeks leading up to the announcement, Tarkanian, whose health has been failing, had been optimistic that this would finally be the year he would be elected and had said in a phone interview earlier this season that it would be a special honor.

"He is as good a coach as we have ever had in our sport," Hall of Fame coach Larry Brown told USA TODAY Sports during a recent interview. "Tark, his teams played hard as hell. They played exactly the way he wanted them to play. They were so much better defensively than anyone ever gave them credit for. He influenced a lot of coaches."

Tarkanian reached four Final Fours ‚?? 1977, 1987, 1990 and 1991 ‚?? and won the national title in 1990 with UNLV. His 1991 UNLV team, which lost to Duke in the national semifinals, is regarded by many as one of the sport's most dominant teams.

From the start of his Division I coaching career at Long Beach State in 1968 to his final season at his alma mater, Fresno State, in 2002, Tarkanian was incessantly dogged by suspicions of cheating.

He was also a charming, colorful figure with that U-shaped smile who grew so stressed during games that he would gnaw on a white towel. Off the court, he used to hang with luminaries such as Frank Sinatra and offer quotes that echoed through history, like this memorable one: "The NCAA is so mad at Kentucky that it put Cleveland State on two years' probation."

He was a college basketball innovator well ahead of his time.

History is laden with other memorable, influential Final Four teams, but few as dominant as Tarkanian's UNLV teams in the early 1990s. The starting lineup in 1991 consisted of players with a combined 23 years of college experience.

"That's the scary part," said UNLV coach Dave Rice, a role player on those teams. "Can it ever happen to that degree again? Will we ever have a situation where that many guys stay in college where they are good enough until junior or senior year? Times have changed."

But UNLV's significance transcended the sport. They exuded an us-against-the-world mentality, thriving in 1990 in spite of a string of player suspensions. And they possessed the glitzy aura of showtime basketball.

"In the '90s the town just embraced it," former UNLV star Stacey Augmon said. "Everywhere we went we were like the NBA guys."

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George Lynch, who played for North Carolina in the 1991 Final Four, says no national champion since -- not 1996 Kentucky, not 2009 North Carolina -- has come close to matching UNLV. "When Vegas was good, all the kids idolized them," Lynch says. "Seeing how those guys played, expressed themselves, to most youth, they were the Fab Five before Michigan's Fab Five."

Eric Snow, the former Michigan State player in the early 1990s, was a senior in high school when UNLV completed an undefeated regular season in 1990-91. And he said: "I don't think there has been a team close since. They had a style of play and being out in Vegas, it was a place a lot of people wanted to go to. It was a place where players from anywhere in the country would have gone. Most of the top players when I came out, if UNLV came to talk, they all would have wanted to go."

Tarkanian's players played hard for him, almost without exception. And they were unflinchingly loyal. When the NCAA was closing in on Tarkanian after he won the 1990 national title, Augmon was the first player to say he would not play if Tarkanian were not permitted by the NCAA or UNLV to be his coach the following season.

"Coach Tark gave us the freedom on the court," Augmon said. "We called it organized chaos."

He gave players second and third chances and was criticized almost every step of the way while being deemed a Father Flanagan figure.

Wherever Tarkanian was, the NCAA seemingly was never far away. He was investigated several times during his career, and he always fought for due process, a trailblazer on that front.

"Tarkanian told me he decided to wire the room where the investigators were talking to the players, just to make sure the tape they got was the same one the NCAA got," former longtime coach Tom Penders said. "Before that, that never happened. You didn't even have the right to have a copy of your own interview."

In a phone interview last month, Tarkanian's son, Danny, said the recent issues with the NCAA enforcement unit that have become public -- including the firing of two investigators for ethical missteps -- have illuminated problems within the association that Tarkanian had been talking about for decades.

In 1992, Tarkanian and wife Lois filed a lawsuit against the NCAA, claiming the association manufactured evidence against him and his programs in attempts to run him out of coaching. In 1998, six weeks before it was due to go to trial, Tarkanian and the NCAA reached a settlement, with the association paying him $2.5 million.

After Tarkanian's departure from UNLV, many former players distanced themselves from the program, harboring bitter feelings about how the university and NCAA treated Tarkanian. He had been the subject of several NCAA investigations and was ultimately forced by the school to resign after the 1991-92 season. And then the program that reached four Final Fours between 1977 and '91 spiraled into irrelevance.

"You had an administration for many years that was anti-Tarkanian," former UNLV point guard Greg Anthony said.

The late Charlie Spoonhour, UNLV's coach from 2001 to '04, took steps to reconnect the program with its past. His successor, Lon Kruger, went further, extending a hand to former players. The court was named after Tarkanian in 2005.

"The only person hurt during that president (Robert Maxson)-Coach Tark situation was the university," Augmon says. "That is the only thing hurt. It hurt UNLV. The president is gone, Coach Tark is gone. The university is still here trying to recover. It has taken two decades to do it. And that's just two people, two people who could not get along, could not see eye to eye. It brought down the whole fortress."

After two decades, UNLV is now fully embracing the success of Tarkanian's teams. With two former players -- Rice and assistant Augmon -- on staff from the 1990 national title team and with a push to illuminate positive memories of those glory years, one of history's most unique programs has finally rediscovered its roots.

"The most important thing is you are starting to see the identification of all that was positive about what we were able to accomplish as a group," says Anthony, the point guard on UNLV's Final Four teams of 1990 and '91. "I am just happy that Coach Tarkanian, his legacy, particularly in Nevada, has been embraced by both generations."

Throughout his tenure, Tarkanian also added fuel to heated West Coast rivalries.

Tarkanian would be quick to point the finger at UCLA players who showed up in airports in alligator boots and were never far from one Sam Gilbert. He said rival Jim Harrick was ethically "as straight as the letter 'S'." And he called Arizona's Lute Olson "Midnight Lute" for what Tarkanian said was Olson's penchant for swooping in to steal a recruit at the 11th hour.

And even in recent months, anytime Tarkanian ventured to the Thomas & Mack Center to watch UNLV, he would always receive the loudest ovation.

"Always got to remember who started the whole thing," UNLV player Mike Moser said. "It definitely was Tarkanian. Man, he is still a celebrity out here."

Tarkanian has long had tremendous respect for several current coaches, most notably Bill Self, the Kansas coach who still talks to him by phone. Self recalled late this season that after Tarkanian's Fresno State team beat Self's 32-5 Tulsa team for the third time in the 1999-2000 season in the final of the WAC tournament, Tarkanian entered the Tulsa locker room to speak to the team.

"He said, 'Just so you know, you guys are better than us,' " Self said. " 'I don't know why we have your number. You guys have a chance to go far in the NCAAs. You guys deserve this more than we do. I just want to tell you how much I love watching you play.'

"The thing about Tark that amazes me, obviously he won a ton of games, obviously he recruited unbelievable players, obviously he got them to play together and to play hard," Self added. "The players that play for him, the ones that I know, all sing his praises. They say he was a tough, tough guy. He loved the game. He had great respect for the game and for other coaches. I love Tark."